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Shocking Beauty: Thomas Hobbs’ Innovative Garden Vision

by Thomas Hobbs

Seasons of My Garden

by Marjorie Harris, Andreas Trauttmansdorff, photog.

Canadian Garden Design: Ideas and Inspirations for Your Garden

by Mark Cullen

New City Gardener: Natural Techniques and Necessary Skills for a Successful Urban Garden

by Judith Adam, Tim Saunders, photog.

For those who consider gardening a spectator sport, autumn is the off season. The sweet surprises of spring, the colours that burgeoned then blazed through the summer, are all over now. There’s nothing to look forward to but limp leaves, crusty seed heads, and a palette that fades irrevocably to brown.

Not so for those of us who play in the dirt. Autumn is the perfect time for design and planning while our triumphs and failures are still fresh in our minds, and we’re filled with desire, good intention, and that endless faith in graceful beauty that is the mark of a pure-hearted gardener.

Shocking Beauty, by Vancouver nurseryman Thomas Hobbs, would stir even the most moribund imagination. Hobbs’ book-jacket bio describes him as an “impresario of garden and floral design.” The sobriquet is apt: this book is as fulsomely rich an entertainment as opera. Every page is a spread of texture and colour that astonishes and delights.

Essentially, this is a book of photographs with extended cutlines, arranged in 10 chapters, each with a short introductory essay by Hobbs. The first, “Inspiration,” is the weakest, skirting cliché and queasy sentiment, but from there the chapters steadily improve. Each principle is illustrated with a panoply of photographs, many from American gardens. For northerners, this usually provokes acute flora-envy, but in “Zonal Denial” Hobbs encourages gardeners to flout the weather, to be escapists. “Like a form of bragging, we always add a zone or two to reality in hopes of being able to grow forbidden fruit – plants that need a milder climate than we are given.” After thumbing these pages, one longs to rip out every last petunia and impatiens to plant a tropical paradise of spear-leaved yucca, voluptuous cannas and catalpas, and even castor oil bean and cardoon. (Hobbs advocates stealing from the vegetable garden as often as from the jungle and grasslands.)

Although there are enough familiar plants here to make a gardener feel at home, the main thrill of Shocking Beauty is discovering unusual combinations and new treatments, whether it is an unknown cultivar of nasturtium or an exquisitely practical way of storing the hose that transforms it into a garden sculpture.

For his ideas, Hobbs draws on hundreds of gardens, including his own. There is a different sort of pleasure (and at least as much inspiration) in witnessing the evolution of one particular garden through the changing seasons of a single year and through its transformations from year to year. Seasons of My Garden is the intimate story of one long, narrow city backyard, at the Toronto home of Marjorie Harris, veteran Canadian gardening writer and editor-in-chief of Gardening Life magazine. Over the past dozen years, her garden has evolved from tight strips of perennials bordering “enough grass to give the yard that green concrete bowling alley look” to a richly textured, constantly changing personal landscape.

The book is beautifully illustrated with Andreas Trauttmansdorff’s photographs of the garden through all four seasons as well as details of particular flowers and foliage (there are family snaps of early incarnations, too). Above all, this is a book to be read. It is like sitting down for a cup of tea with a friend who, with charming candour, tells you how her remarkable garden came to be. She doesn’t boast: she admits her failings, her false starts, her weakness for traditional cottage gardens, and shares her ultimate epiphany: “What happened in 1986 was a turning point. I was sitting drinking coffee one morning, staring out into a soft fall of snow, musing in the kind of pearly winter light that flattens everything. What a totally dull bit of ground out there, I remember thinking. I stared and stared. Creative staring, it turned out, because before long I could see what it should look like.”

This is inspiration by example. If Harris can turn such an unpromising inner-city lot into a private Eden, then surely even the meanest piece of dirt is not beyond hope. There are limitations to such a personal approach – the design ideas resist transplanting precisely because each seems so perfectly suited to this particular garden – but the approach is also the book’s strength. Harris’s words inspire confidence. By sharing her own commitment (some might say addiction) to growing things, gardeners everywhere will sigh and say, yes, me too, me too!

“I’ll continue to garden until my entire body gives out,” she concludes. “As each part goes, I’ll figure out a new way to garden without it. I can also see the day when my garden will be only in my imagination, still giving me pleasure, still being a good companion. What the garden has provided in my life is a retrieval of that sense of infinite possibilities and the joy you have as a little kid: being able to relish the most basic physical play and allow your imagination to soar.”

Each of the four seasonal sections ends with a list of tips and Harris’s favourite species. There is also an index, a nice touch, but it doesn’t make this a how-to book. Hobbs and Harris can inspire, but most gardeners still need practical instruction to help them shape a landscape that lives up to the one blooming in their imaginations.

Canadian Garden Design: Ideas and Inspirations for Your Garden surely has one of the dullest titles of the year, which is a shame because it is a thoroughly engaging read. Author Mark Cullen is the president of southern Ontario’s Cullen Garden Centres, but perhaps more familiar to a national audience as host of Home and Garden Television’s Right in Your Own Backyard. Cullen strikes a tone that manages to be informative without being dictatorial. He approaches gardening as “serious puttering,” and although the chapters provide everything gardeners want to know about colour schemes, creating balance, shaping with texture, positioning accessories such as gazebos and sun dials, it is done in a way that implies there are no hard-and-fast rules, only delightful options.

New City Gardener: Natural Techniques and Necessary Skills for a Successful Urban Garden, on the other hand, is solid, standard fare with the teacherly tone that is, unfortunately, a hallmark of how-to books. Written by Toronto landscape designer and horticulture instructor Judith Adam, it covers all the garden-design bases: style, usage, soil preparation, plant selection, care and maintenance of trees, vines, lawns, and flora of every sort. The photographs adequately illustrate the principles, but don’t count on them to inspire. Many fail to give the impression they were shot within city limits at all.

At $24.95, it is the least expensive of this crop of garden design books. As a practical reference, it will suffice. But gardeners who are eager for inspiration, advice, revelation, or a touch of the intimacy that gardening itself requires, will more likely find it in the words of Cullen, Harris, and Hobbs.

 

Reviewer: Merilyn Simonds

Publisher: Raincoast Books

DETAILS

Price: $49.95

Page Count: 160 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-55192--220-7

Issue Date: 1999-10

Categories: Sports, Health & Self-help

Reviewer: Merilyn Simonds

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

DETAILS

Price: $39.95

Page Count: 146 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-00-255755-5

Released:

Issue Date: October 1, 1999

Categories: Sports, Health & Self-help

Reviewer: Merilyn Simonds

Publisher: Penguin Books Canada

DETAILS

Price: $40

Page Count: 200 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-670-87639-9

Released:

Issue Date: October 1, 1999

Categories: Sports, Health & Self-help

Reviewer: Merilyn Simonds

Publisher: Firefly Books

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 224 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-55209-313-1

Released:

Issue Date: October 1, 1999

Categories: Sports, Health & Self-help